Shop Your Closet for Pantone SS 2024 Colors - Part 1: Identify Your Solid Pieces

With spring underway in most of the Northern Hemisphere, this is a good time to check in with the Pantone Spring/Summer 2024 New York Fashion Week colors to see what's trending for the season. Knowing what colors are expected to be hot for the season can help you plan shopping - for example, if one of your favorite colors is on the list, it's a good time to look for that color in stores. But knowing the current colors is also a very easy, inexpensive, and sustainable way to participate in a fashion trend simply by shopping your closet for these colors...or their close cousins. While Pantone specifies particular colors, how those colors show up in clothing and accessories can vary, so you don't need to be too literal about matching the shade perfectly to be on trend.

Here's a view of the 10 "leading colors" (accents) and 5 "new classics" (neutrals) that make up the SS 2024 NYFW palette.

Pantone SS 2024 Color Palette

In this first post in the series, I encourage you to look through your wardrobe for spring/summer clothing and accessories in these colors. Today, I am focusing on solid colored pieces because they can easily be mixed and matched, but depending on the size of your wardrobe, you might pull your print pieces in these colors as well. (For me, that will be the next step of shopping my closet.) Don't get overly concerned about matching the Pantone colors exactly or only pulling pieces that match each other in color/style/etc. I'd recommend casting a wide net to catch a variety of pieces because you can always narrow them down later.

Some of these items may be things that you wear all the time and are quite familiar with, but others might be things that have been in your closet unworn for a while. I recommend trying on any items you aren't completely sure about to make sure that they still fit well, are comfortable, and appear in good condition when worn (since things that look in good condition on the hanger sometimes reveal themselves as problematic when on the body). If they don't make the cut on these criteria, now is a great time to pass these items on through secondhand sale or donation because other people will be shopping for these colors this season.

If you aren't sure how to style the item or what you would pair it with, but you do like it, I'd keep it in the mix for now; those pieces will be great candidates for a styling session (which I'll get to in a later post).

You can shop your closet for as many of the Pantone colors as you choose. You can focus on your favorites of the palette or collect items in every color - it's up to you. I shopped my closet for items in each of these colors as a demonstration.

Rooibos Tea was a good fit with my wardrobe's "Maroon" color. I think of rich brownish-red as more of a fall color than a spring/summer one, so it was interesting to see this one in the palette. Note that I've pulled variants on the color that I wouldn't necessarily wear together, but that each individually are in the spirit of the Pantone color.

The fruity Orangeade is a bit darker than my "Coral" color, but I thought these pieces were still in the spirit of the Pantone color. This feels like such a classic warm weather color with its warmth and brightness. As you can see, I tend to wear this color in bottoms and accessories rather than tops and cardigans/jackets.

Watercress is represented in my closet by some well-coordinated garments in the "Aloe Vera" color from Christopher & Banks as well as some accessories. I routinely treat this shade as a semi-neutral/colored neutral that regularly appears in my spring wardrobe especially.

Desert Flower is a lovely warm pink that shows up quite a lot in my warm weather wardrobe in the form of many "Sandstone Coral" items from Christopher & Banks. This is a nice change of pace from the bright cool Barbie pinks that have dominated fashion recently.

For Chambray Blue, I focused on items in my wardrobe's "Soft Blue" category, though actual chambray would be an obvious and very welcome choice as well. I think my version is a tad more muted than Pantone's but still represents the color well.

I don't wear a lot of purple, so I had to take some liberties with Pastel Lilac. I pulled out items in a variety of light purple shades, some of which are darker and/or more intense than the light powdery Pantone version, but I am happy with these options.

Marlin is a bit of a chameleon color to me; it's neither purple nor blue but somewhere in between - that odd indigo color in the ROYGBIV rainbow? I decided to interpret it as a more purple tone so that I could select items that would coordinate well with the lavender/light purple items for Pastel Lilac above. (I also have a good number of Christopher & Banks "Soft Indigo" items that would represent the blue side of Marlin and work very well with the Chambray Blue/"Soft Blue," but I decided to stick with the purple ones.)

Lemon Drop is a bit darker and definitely more vibrant than the "Light Yellow" tank/pants/cardigan trio and "Camel-gold" skirt here, but the true Lemon Drop color is not an easy one for me to wear. It's too similar to the dreaded mustard yellow to pair well with my pink skin tone. But I am quite happy to substitute a more flattering shade of yellow for the Pantone color, and my accessory choices do reflect some of the depth and intensity of Lemon Drop.

Pantone's Mint is very different from any of the colors in my wardrobe that I call mint (which are lighter, more blue-green, or both); it's more like the "Pure Green" or "Grass Green" in my world. But whatever you call it, I love this fresh shade of green for spring/summer.

Shades of blue-green are extremely well-represented in my closet, so I had to narrow things down when making my Capri selections. Ironically, the best match to Capri was this group of items that I categorize in my wardrobe as "Light Mint" (yes, I know that these have way too much blue to be the mint plant, but I called it that after a color sample I found with that name, illogical as it may be). Anything in that aquamarine/turquoise/aqua color family would be terrific for Capri.

Brilliant White has an optic intensity that is brighter and more opaque than the "White" items in my wardrobe, but really, summer whites are summer whites and any version will be a welcome addition to warm weather outfits. I discovered that I have quite a number of white accessories and had to be selective in choosing items for this grouping. (I really, really like white pearls.)

The Mushroom color is a lovely soft taupe that spans the beige/grey (greige) divide, and it's very close to an ideal taupe color that I have wanted to include in my wardrobe for several years. But I haven't been lucky in finding my taupe...and somehow have managed not to fill my closet with inferior taupe options. So my version of Mushroom here is definitely more on the beige side, which is itself a color that I don't wear a lot.

Light grey is a color I like a lot and look reasonably good in, but I hardly own anything in it, hence this rather pitiful collection of items representing Northern Droplet. (I used to own a light grey pencil skirt that I LOVED as a wonderful alternative to white. But now I own a white one that I really like, so I feel that I'm covered there. Does that make sense? I am on a No Buy/Low Buy/Slow Buy year in 2024 so I may or may not take advantage of the trendiness of Northern Droplet to shop the stores for this color.)

As we turn to the darker grey of Quiet Shade, my wardrobe offers me a lot of options in both clothing and accessories. Grey is an awkward color for me because there are so many different (and often clashing) undertones to it that it can be hard to build a pleasing column of color with it. But a nice thing about neutrals is how well they pair with other colors and can be used to tone down more vivid accent colors, so even if I never wear any of the garments together, they are all useful.

Finally, we have the khaki tan of Brush...which is a color I don't own at all! But that's perfectly okay - I decided to substitute a darker brown, in which I have several good spring/summer items, for the Brush color in the palette.

In my next post in this series, I will pull out some print pieces in these colors to supplement my solid ones.

Do you have any favorites, or anti-favorites, in the Pantone SS 2024 NYFW color palette? Do you follow color trends at all? Do you ever shop your closet for trends? Do you take advantage of a color's presence on the Pantone palette to shop the stores for that color?

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